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ROBERTS CREEK - What restaurants tell you about the nutrient values in their menu items is fairly consistent. But how they tell you — or whether they tell you at all — is anybody’s guess.

“I was struck right away by the poster in Wendy’s,” said Sunshine Coast businesswoman and mom Sarah Tomkins.

Wendy’s was the clear winner for visibility of its nutrition facts disclosure. The poster board containing the fat, sodium and caloric content of the menu items is large and prominently displayed right by the front counter at the Gibsons outlet.

McDonald’s, by contrast, posted its fact sheet behind glass in a dark hallway next to the toilets. But McDonald’s additionally provides nutrition facts on the packaging of some menu items and on its tray liners.

A&W also has a large grid of menu items and their nutritional content printed on the back of the tray liner.

“I would never in a million years look on the back of the tray liner,” said Tomkins as her son Arlan, 2, dipped his nose in a pile of salt he had poured on the table. Then he stuck his tongue in the pile. So much for his sodium allowance.

“The tray liner is not very useful because by the time you get it, your food is already piled on top of it and you’ve already ordered,” Tomkins noted.

Wendy’s, McDonald’s and A&W all have robust online nutritional information, but Wendy’s and McDonald’s also boast meal-building calculators with ingredient-by-ingredient customization.

The golden arches also won points from Tomkins for the extra effort of posting nutritional information in-store for all the components of its burgers, right down to the individual condiments and the pickles.

“That’s really good because you know what you are saving when you take something off your burger,” said Tomkins, a traditional medicine practitioner.

Tim Hortons provides its customers with a nutrition brochure from a rack near the cash register. The full-colour pamphlet is easy to read and, like the nutrition grids provided by its fast-food competitors, it lists all the nutritional values suggested by Health Canada.

I say suggested because nutritional disclosure is completely voluntary for restaurants in Canada. And, as of this year, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency no longer verifies the nutrition claims made by restaurants.

Those restaurants that choose to disclose are encouraged to report on all the nutrients that are required by the Nutrition Facts labels on packaged foods, including fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, fibre, carbohydrates and a smattering of vitamins.

Tim Hortons goes one step further in its brochure, adding a page of Healthful Hints: three lists of menu items that are low in fat, high in fibre and rich in calcium. The extra guidance had Tomkins nodding and smiling.

Some chains — nearly all the restaurants that disclose nutrition information are chains with highly standardized menus — offer customers little guidance about how to use the large complex grids of numbers and daily allowance values.

Yogen Fruz provides nutrition information for a hypothetical serving of 125 millilitres, which unfortunately doesn’t correspond to any of its regular serving sizes. A medium frozen yogurt is about 1.6 servings, leaving the customer to multiply the figures for 13 different nutrients and the caloric value.

Red Robin’s Canadian website has undergone a transformation for this year, from a laborious and incomplete system of disclosure to a very slick and easy to use set of grids broken down into entrées, appetizers and desserts, including a separate page for each salad dressing, kids’ entrée and kids’ side dish.

As a mom, Tomkins lamented that all the daily value figures provided by the big burger chains are calculated for adults, which makes Red Robin’s new approach refreshing.

“There is no requirement [to disclose] at the federal level or in any jurisdiction across the country,” said Joyce Reynolds, executive vice-president for governmental affairs for the 30,000-member Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association. “The government did consult very widely when they put in place the current nutritional labelling [for packaged foods] and foodservices was specifically excluded because of the complexity of providing meals directly to consumers.”

The association argues that the variability of suppliers from location to location and the high degree of customization of entrées in the restaurant environment make it almost impossible to provide accurate data.

“A restaurant is very different from a food processing assembly line,” said Reynolds. “The amount of dressing on a salad could vary from employee to employee or customer to customer.”

CRFA officials have been meeting with Health Canada as part of that agency’s efforts to create a national standard for nutritional disclosure by restaurants and the association has drafted a set of core values it uses to guide those negotiations, called the Healthy Living Strategy.

In 2005, the association issued a voluntary nutrition information program that advises members with standardized menus how they should disclose nutrition information. That program coincided with the implementation of Health Canada’s voluntary disclosure guidelines.

The CRFA guidelines require information be “prominently displayed, prior to point of sale.” Information can be distributed through a binder available upon request, posters, brochures, menu inserts or computer kiosk.

“Health Canada is currently working with the retail food industry to explore options for improving the access to nutritional information in restaurants for Canadian consumers,” according to Health Canada spokesman Stephane Shank. “Health Canada recently initiated discussions to explore how best to provide accurate and consistent nutritional information to consumers, and these discussions are ongoing.”

In the meantime, restaurants that undertake voluntary nutritional disclosure also face the significant expense of calculation either through exacting measurement and calculation from a database containing known nutrient values for every ingredient, or through laboratory analysis. The cost can range from $200 to $1,000 per item and would have to be repeated every time a recipe or component of a dish changes, Reynolds noted.

National chains might have “tens of thousands” of ingredients, she said.

“McDonald’s has led the industry by providing customers with comprehensive nutrition information using many different avenues,” said McDonald’s Canada spokesman Chris Stannell, listing in-store signage, tray liners, food packaging and the corporate website as sources of information customers can access.

While Stannell couldn’t point to specific evidence that displaying such information has changed the way customers order, he noted that McDonald’s has evolved its menu to reflect changing nutritional priorities, adding fruit and several salad choices.

Some chains, such as Subway, organize their menu and their nutritional disclosure by the fat content of the menu items to reflect the changing priorities of consumers.

“I think it’s confusing when everyone has their own way of displaying the information and it’s not standardized the way it is on prepared foods,” said Rosie Dhaliwal, a dietitian and counsellor at Simon Fraser University. “It leaves the onus on the consumer to figure what it means if my Subway sandwich has 2,700 milligrams of sodium. The average person might not know that is more than their daily value for the average adult in one sandwich.”

Adding to the problem is that few of the restaurants that do disclose nutritional information include the daily values recommended by Health Canada, particularly those nutrients people should limit, such as saturated fats and sodium, she said.

Tomkins, the young mother who volunteered to read nutrition grids for The Sun, was stunned by the amount of sodium in so-called healthy menu items such as bran and fruit muffins, which often exceed that of a hamburger.

Dhaliwal said the parents of small children have a particularly tough task. Health Canada says small children don’t need any added salt at all in their foods.

“People don’t realize that a muffin, even though it’s higher in fibre, has more fat, sugar and salt than a doughnut,” Dhaliwal said. “Parents need to make sure they bring at least some of their children’s food from home.”

rshore@vancouversun.com

With files from The Vancouver Sun and Postmedia News

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Fatabase 2.0: Making your way through the menu maze in an attempt to eat healthy food

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